Online education has experienced tremendous growth over the last decade, spurred by a combination of technological innovations, economic drivers, and changing demographics. Today, more than one third of the nation’s college students take courses online. According to the latest survey by the College Board and Babson Survey Research Group, Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States (2013), over 6.7 million students at four-year institutions in the United States were taking at least one online course during the fall of 2011, an increase of more than half a million, or 9.3 percent, over 2010 (Babson, 2013).

In this context we have experienced the rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). But what are MOOCs? Can we consider MOOCs a phenomenon associated with online education or just a continuation of the space associated with social media? Are they products of our neoliberal society? We will have a discussion about MOOCs and question of what the “C” means. Are MOOCs courses or online events? We will discuss how to teach in the open internet without learning outcomes. Finally, we will question the word “course” or at least demand a clarification of what constitutes a course. We will discuss an example of a MOOC I offered in spring 2013 at Berkeley City College.

There have been numerous conversations in the last few decades about the neoliberalization of higher education and how colleges and university are increasingly being conceived as needing to adhere to the parameters of private sector business and market values. Even if the actions, paradigms and goals of educational leaders and institutions are not directed specifically towards the privatization of this area of public services; nevertheless, they manage educational institutions as if they were, or should be, run according to the models of private businesses. An example of this is the ever-increasing emphasis on productivity, budget constraints and the massification of education. In the case of this last development, illustrated by last year’s obsession with MOOCs, it is interesting to note that most of the conversations about MOOCs did not focus on the idea of open education but rather on using them in ways that could serve the greatest amount of students with the fewest resources. Furthermore, more and more corporations are directly or indirectly influencing curriculum, for example, through research and materials produced by textbook giants. Another example of this corporate influence can be found in the use of consultants to outsource critical operations of the educational institutions such as technology and assessment. At the same time, perhaps because of the focus on economic productivity, another phenomenon that has become predominant in the last two decades is the precarization of instruction in the form of adjunctivism. In this short conference/conversation we will discuss these issues and debate the possibilities and consequences of conceiving higher educational institutions that conform to the parameters of the private business model.